Some data management systems include a plurality of servers that boot from an operating system installation image or from snapshots including modifications to the operating system installation image. The operating system installation image and snapshots are stored in partitions of a shared drive such as, but not limited to, a RAID volume. System performance is affected by competition among the servers attempting to simultaneously access the shared drive.
The shared drive typically includes one or more storage disks including, but not limited to, SATA hard disks. The servers rely on disk seek algorithms that tend to having weaker performance at outer disk tracks. Read look ahead buffers and other improvements can increase system performance by reducing latencies between server ports accessing the shared drive. However, any improvement is limited by continued competition among the servers for access to one or more disks of the shared drive.